Media RSS - a better way to publish syndication content (audio, video, images)
28 Mar 2007I have been working on syndication stuff for last some months. I learnt about different standards (feed formats, microformats etc). One of those is Yahoo! Media RSS, which is module (or extension) of RSS 2.0.
Definition (from MRSS FAQ):-
"Media RSS" is a new RSS module that supplements the enclosure capabilities of RSS 2.0 (FAQ).Enclosures in RSS are already being used to syndicate audio files (Podcasting) and images. Media RSS extends enclosures to handle other media types, such as short films or TV, in addition to providing additional metadata with the media. Media RSS enables content publishers and bloggers to broadly distribute descriptions of and links to multimedia content.
YouTube!, Flickr, Google Video, Yahoo! Video, Grouper etc are exposing their content as Media RSS feeds.
There are advantages of using Media RSS:-
- Allows to embed more metadata for content
- Allows to group different media-type representing same content with flexibility to mark the default content.
- Allows to expose content through custom-player (html page, flash-app etc), if content-providers don't want to give away the url for media-files.
- Search engines (Yahoo!, Google! etc) and feed-aggregators understand media-rss.
- and more...
I like the flexibility which allows me to expose feeds in different options/ways while following the standard. I recommend, if you are working on some projects where you have content (audio, video, image etc), you to look at Media RSS.
Links:-
- Media RSS FAQ
- Media RSS Spec
- Media RSS Yahoo Group
- Must read article from Niall Kennedy
- Comparision between different type of Media RSS formats (Yahoo! and Apple)
I have requested for media-rss feed for video.onflex.org and revision3.com.
I have also extended (locally) Adobe AS3 Syndication lib to support Media RSS module for one of my projects. I need to submit the code after testing. I hope, I get sometime to do that.